Without a roof, outside the law At first fascinated by photography, Agnès Varda broke into the feature film with the memorable debut of Pointe Court, then devoted herself to documentary films for eight years to return with a second feature film, shooting alternately, with enviable regularity, feature and documentary films, she again leaves in 1977, this time for nine years in documentary films, to return triumphantly to the feature film. This return was the film “Homeless, Outlaw”, in which the influence of Vard’s studies in documentary literature on the artistic structure of the picture is nowhere more noticeable.
First of all, the pictures of terrible poverty, through which the main character passes, a hippy vagabond, the appearance is completely devoid of romanticization of the marginal lifestyle, such degeroization in combination with sympathy for rebels I saw only in Aristakisyan’s film “A Place on Earth”: dilapidated gateways, old cars, construction and agricultural junk, in general a good-natured attitude to the heroine of surrounding people and her frank unwillingness to socialize, to make at least minimal concessions to society.
Varda, like Aristakisyan, depicting a commune of hippies, sympathizes with his heroine, but also shows the futility of her rebellion, the primitiveness of desires and love for freebies and “grass”. Then a young, little-known, aspiring actress Sandrine Bonner brilliantly copes with the creation of such a controversial image as Mona: she easily goes to rapprochement with people, but her ideologically unsupported nonconformism turns into primitive hedonism and a purely utilitarian approach to people.
In this regard, her dialogue with a farmer who gave up his career as a philosopher in favor of agriculture looks symbolic, he unfolds before her a real theory of meaningful downshifting as a consistent resistance to the socio-political system (in general, there are many theorizations in the picture and a desire to understand why different groups of people live differently and how they shape their life path ideologically). As it turns out, the main method of resistance to capitalist exploitation is subsistence farming, which protects man from alienation in the existential and economic sense.
But the heroine is not able to understand this and bet on everyday honest work, her character is too damaged by nihilism and idleness, she does not want to depend on anyone or anything, even if it is her own hands and will, she prefers doing nothing. As M. Duras said in an interview, hippies ideologically embody the emptiness behind which nothing stands. Ward’s film is merciless in its assessments of the nihilistic rebellion, as inconsistent and always tragic for its media, the radical rupture of all social ties turns into both absolute freedom and absolute loneliness.
Homeless, Outlaw is more existential than social, about total loneliness in a world where everyone is fighting for their place in the sun. It unvarnishedly shows the tragic consequences of a marginal way of life, its futile nihilism and the absence of any positive ideological components. Like Place on Earth, it is a sentence on so many lonely wanderers dying of cold and starvation in the ditches as it is a society that cannot make everyone happy and condemns many to an extra-systemic existence in search of the unknown. This is a film about the futility of horizontal semantic search, about the inability of a person to find the meaning of life in a material one-dimensionality, devoid of spirituality, art, religion, high feelings.